Appendix C: The Executive Opinion Survey 2016: Views of the Business Community on the Global Risks of Highest Concern for Doing Business

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Every year since 1979 the World Economic Forum has conducted the Executive Opinion Survey (EOS). This survey captures invaluable information on a broad range of socio-economic issues. In the 2016 edition, the opinions of 14,723 business executives in 141 economies were captured between February and June 2016.1 After cleaning the data, 13,340 responses in 135 economies were retained.

For the third time, the 2016 edition of the EOS included a question on the risks of highest concern. More specifically, respondents were asked to select the five global risks that they believe to be of most concern for doing business in their country within the next 10 years.

The list of 29 global risks presented in the EOS was derived from the list of global risks of The Global Risks Report 2016 and is similar to the global risks of The Global Risks Report 2017 (see Appendix B for the differences in global risks between the two editions). The number and nature of the EOS and the Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) respondents differ significantly: in the case of the GRPS, respondents comprise a multistakeholder group of experts; in the case of the EOS, they are business executives. The EOS results, which provide the views of executives on the impact of global risks on their businesses, complement the results of the GRPS.

Formally, for each country j the share of EOS respondents selecting each global risk i is:

where Njis the sample size of country j and ni,j is the number of respondents who selected the risk i as one of their five global risks of highest concern for doing business in country j. Ci,jis the share of respondents who selected risk i in country j.

Interested readers can access the results for individual economies and regions here.